Abstract
The movie fantastic voyage (1966) is not an innocent science fiction fantasy but a trope that concurrently underlies the development and implementation of a particular medical imaging technique: the endoscope. Sketching the past, present and future of endoscopy, this article advances the broader argument that medical imaging techniques and media technologies are developed concurrently. The endoscopic gaze - the look from within the body - has gradually become a pervasive mode of corporeal inspection, not only in high-tech medicine, but in television and other popular media as well. But what are the implications of this ubiquitous endoscopic gaze? how may innovations in endoscopic technologies - including the latest virtual techniques - affect doctors’ and patients’ concepts of corporeality? and do these innovations, in turn, affect our collective appreciation of surgical intervention and its consequences? persistent myths of transparency and non-intervention have prevailed in both the production and popular dissemination of the endoscopic gaze, redefining our norms and expectations concerning the perfectibility of the body as a physical container.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 219-237 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | International Journal of Cultural Studies |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2001 |